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As concerns over data privacy abound, Vero is doing social media a little differently

Unlike Threads, Vero has been focused on steady, rather than exponential growth.

When Mark Zuckerberg launched Threads as a competitor to Twitter, it broke ChatGPT’s record to become the fastest-growing social network in history, gaining 100 million users in just a few days. But in the weeks since its launch, Threads’ daily active user count has fallen by significant margins, dropping 82% as of July 31.

Vero, on the other hand, has been growing slowly and steadily for years, flying mostly under the radar as it seeks to build a strong base from which to change the social media landscape. The app, which now has a user base numbering about 6.5 million people, proposes a different, more real, version of social media, one that is importantly lacking the incentives for addiction and vitriol that are present on other platforms.

“People are becoming more and more aware of the problem of platforms mining their data, and then using that data, selling it to advertisers,” Ayman Hariri, the co-founder and CEO of Vero said in an interview with The Street. “We’re definitely seeing people that do come onto the platform organically come because of those concerns.”

Vero is ad-free, subscription-based

Vero was designed to be a completely ad-free, subscription-based social network. Though the company has yet to activate the subscription model – and hasn’t said when it will do so – the result of this ad-free network is a platform without incentives, and therefore, without an algorithm.

“When people talk about data and data mining, it’s really about having enough information on somebody to know what their habits are, and whether or not there’s a way to design things to fit within those habits,” Hariri said. “It’s a negative thing in that you can make the product more addictive. You can potentially manipulate people’s behaviour. And that’s a red line we don’t want to cross.”

These problems of algorithms and misaligned incentives were at the centre of Meta Platforms’  (META) – Get Free Report Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s complaint against the company in 2021. The computer scientist said at the time that “Facebook makes more money when you consume more content,” adding that the platform designed its algorithms to prioritize profits in a way that incentivizes hate speech.

Vero has no such incentives.

“There’s no advertising. Therefore, it isn’t an algorithmic feed,” Hariri said. “Therefore, we’re not looking for content that gets any reaction. We’re not in that world at all. I don’t believe in it.”

It provides users with a chronological feed that, according to Hariri, gives people complete access to their entire following, something advertisement-based platforms have not been able to promise.

“There’s no place for hate speech on our platform,” Hariri said. “We’re not looking for people to be okay with that nor to train people that that’s okay.”

Vero currently employs a human content moderation team, but is looking into tools to bring that effort up to scale.

“I think that free speech and what X is particularly going after is a noble cause, but just the practicality of daily life makes it difficult to achieve something that will work for everybody,” he said. “We’re doing things in different ways.”

And where other platforms, such as YouTube and now X (formerly Twitter) incentivize their creators to make content by sharing percentages of ad revenue, Vero’s approach is necessarily different. There’s no ad revenue to share; the app, instead, will grant creators equity ownership in the platform itself.

Vero users own shares of the company

“If you choose to come to Vero and bring your following, you own shares in the company. It’s got nothing to do with discussions with me or anybody else,” Hariri said. “We’re looking very intently at the regulatory aspects and we’re making bold moves that nobody else has done because we truly mean what it is that we’re saying. We want to be different. And we want to have a different impact on people that join us.”

To that end, Vero acquired Tokenise Stock Exchange International in June, a regulated stock exchange for tokenised securities that was founded in 2018.

“It’s a challenge to go down the path of educating a market and selling to them,” Hariri said. “That’s why our product has to stand on its own two feet as a product that delivers you value. That’s what we’re focused on. That’s why it takes us so long.”

“Our growth is all ahead of us.”

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Ian Krietzberg is a breaking/trending news writer for The Street with a focus on artificial intelligence and the markets. He covers AI companies, safety and ethics extensively. As an offshoot of his tech beat, Ian also covers Elon Musk and his many companies, namely SpaceX and Tesla.

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The other morning I posted an unnecessarily snarky tweet about VERO and a breach of my copyright. That afternoon, I found myself on an hour-long Zoom call with founder CEO Ayman Hariri after he got in touch to discuss what VERO can do to improve.

I’ve written about social media freebooting extensively in the past (1, 2). So-called feature accounts spring up, spreading community vibes, garnering an audience of tens if not hundreds of thousands, only to pivot to selling dropship t-shirts and novelty mugs. Others build followers and then start charging money for featured posts while touting for sponsored posts. The vast majority of these feature accounts post people’s artwork without permission, despite this being against any platform’s terms and conditions — and, let’s not forget, unlawful. It’s a quick way to make easy money from other people’s creativity.

On the left, my Explore page where four of the first 11 posts are feature accounts. On the right, a feature account that takes payments for sharing posts.

At the same time, Instagram and other platform benefits massively, actively encouraging this large-scale copyright infringement by featuring these accounts on the Explore page, and dropping them into people’s “you might also like this” feeds. Instagram must know that these practices are wrong but, given that feature posts account for hundreds of millions of post views each day — and therefore generate vast advertising revenue — it appears to be a policy decision, supported by the legal immunity afforded to them under the DMCA.

Appropriation Should Not Be Normal

For me, Instagram has normalized a culture of appropriation, both casual and blatant, to the point that artists blindly accept these breaches of copyright as they extend their reach, bagging them more followers in the ongoing popularity contest that is social media. I’m one of the few photographers that doesn’t appreciate this new normal, as it frustrates me to see my work enriching others while leaving me with nothing.

At an individual level, it’s small fry — a fraction of a penny in ad revenue that should go to me, not to Instagram. However, at a global level, it’s damaging to artists as, cumulatively, the value inherent in our art is extracted and diverted to Mark Zuckerberg’s immense coffers instead. We’ve accepted this because we’ve been conditioned to compete for attention rather than work as a collective.

VERO: A Different Approach

VERO has been a breath of fresh air, offering a platform that fixes many of the issues that Instagram users have been complaining about for almost a decade. High-resolution images, a chronological feed, more control over sharing, the ability to share different types of content, no ads, only content from people you want to see, and a desktop app. VERO has seen a surge in interest in recent months as Instagram has continued to ostracize photographers and influencers have been gushing about VERO’s superiority.

Like many photographers, I opened an account more than five years ago and lost interest before then rediscovering it in recent months. I don’t put a lot of effort into sharing on social media, but I like the VERO experience, and it feels like a genuine competitor to Instagram. Unlike many other Instagram alternatives that have come and gone, it’s not just for photographers, though photography is at the forefront.

A few days ago, I logged on and discovered an unexpected number of notifications: a “hub” account (as VERO refers to them) had reposted one of my photographs, crediting me and congratulating me on my work. The relentless cynic inside of me sighed and assumed that freebooting had taken next to no time to arrive on VERO, triggering my annoyance. Like every good millennial, I immediately turned to Twitter to voice my disgust and tagged VERO’s account. In my defense, countless people moan at social media companies every day and are met by resounding silence. I have next to no clout, so I figured I was just venting my frustration into the void, maybe prompting a few sympathetic replies to soothe my bad mood.

My unnecessarily snarky tweet triggered a back-and-forth with a couple of photographers with a few trolls jumping on board to inform me that I’m wrong before being soundly schooled by the ridiculously knowledgeable law student and photographer Martin McNeil. What I didn’t expect was a response from Ayman Hariri, the co-founder and CEO of VERO, offering to contact the hub account on my behalf and ask for the post to be removed. A constructive discussion ensued and, to my even greater surprise, Hariri then asked if we could continue on Zoom.

A Zoom Call With the Boss

Four of us — myself, Ayman Hariri, Martin McNeil, and VERO’s Head of Community Tom Hodgson — chatted for an hour, and it would have continued had I not cut it short due to other commitments. I’m aware that I’m in the minority when it comes to having my work posted without my permission and, from what we discussed, it’s apparent that VERO is keen to find a way to give creatives control over their content without impacting people’s desire to share work and have their work shared. Feature accounts are popular for a reason, offering ground-up, community-driven curation of encountered content rather than top-down, algorithm-fed discovery feeds controlled by the platform. As Hariri pointed out, VERO is ad-free — and has stated its commitment to remaining ad-free — so these feature accounts are not generating ad revenue for the platform, as is the case with Instagram.

I put forward my own thoughts on how artists can feel that they have more control, such as the option to mark an image as being available for reposting, or a system of reposting that is built into the app, effectively co-publishing the post, not too dissimilar to Tumblr. No doubt, VERO has pondered these options, and Hariri made it clear that he was wary of adding complexity to a social app that depends on simplicity. We seemed to differ in opinion here, but I’ve not just plowed literally tens of millions of dollars into my own Instagram alternative and, not having the same depth of knowledge, there are likely a host of implications that I’ve not thought through. Maybe my ideas are rubbish. We shall see.

 

My feed on the rather beautiful VERO desktop app, currently in beta.

A chunk of the discussion was centered around the technological solutions that would give artists more control, with McNeil citing the success of YouTube’s ContentID system — notably, something that it was forced to implement in order to avoid chaos, not a feature that it established out of a noble desire to protect creators (in 2007, Google faced a Federal court claim brought by Viacom who sought $1 billion in damages for secondary infringement, a case that ran for seven years and resulted in an out-of-court settlement. The lawsuit prompted Google to begin work that same year on what would become the ContentID system).

Solutions are out there — Google’s own reverse image search is evidence enough — and McNeil has been part of a collective of musicians, authors, illustrators, and photographers who have been consulted by Meta and others on the topic in ongoing talks. I’ve discussed previously the potential of technology such as that provided by French company IMATAG. None of these will resolve freebooting or intellectual property theft completely, but that’s not a reason to ignore it.

If You Care About Social Media, You Should Care About VERO

There are no quick fixes and our conversation was never going to find any, but the discussion felt productive, and it was refreshing to be able to engage, not just with the heads of a social media company, but with people who appear to be genuinely interested in taking our views on board and working to create a platform that is the best possible version of what it can be. Hariri came across as authentic and deeply invested, not just financially, but in establishing VERO as a social media app that respects its users and their content.

In Zuckerberg, we have a billionaire that is busy destroying his share price thanks to an obsession with technology that even his employees believe is pointless, while his chief underling tells photographers: “Thanks for your help now jog along.” In Hariri, we have a billionaire that loves photography and who has invested a vast sum of money gambling on an idea — an alternative to Instagram — that according to precedent, is destined to fail. I, for one, hope that it doesn’t.

I don’t know whether VERO can find a solution to freebooting, but in our conversation, its intentions seem clear. We need a new normal when it comes to social media, and VERO appears determined to provide it.

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Andy Day is a British photographer and writer living in France. He began photographing parkour in 2003 and has been doing weird things in the city and elsewhere ever since. He’s addicted to climbing and owns a fairly useless dog. He has an MA in Sociology & Photography which often makes him ponder what all of this really means. andyday.com

Sourced from fstoppers